Another Voice

Wednesday, 6th May 2009

A funeral teaches me that Gray was wrong in his Elegy about the loneliness of virtue

It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire.

Though they are not far from each other, the bleak Staffordshire moorlands are a different world to the sweet, grassy banks of the Derbyshire Wye where it flows through Chatsworth Park. And Andrew Cavendish and Ken Buxton lived anyway in different worlds, one a duke in his eighties, the other a supplier of plastic tanks in his fifties; and though both would have been friendly had they met, they could have had little to discuss. But something links them, and through each of their funerals it shone.

The morning of Andrew’s funeral was one of those perfect English spring mornings that, though we do not enjoy them often, define for us the English spring. I hardly knew him well and was only a chance mourner; it being a lovely day and he having been kind to me when I was his Member of Parliament, I could think of no better way to spend a sunny hour. He had been a popular man — everyone knew that — and I did not expect pew space in the church, but thought I’d stand outside with the stragglers.

Stragglers? There were more people outside the church than within: hundreds, perhaps a thousand. The event afterwards became quite famous and was widely described, and lyrically in the Spectator by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Robert Salisbury, too, has written about Andrew in this magazine, with greater acquaintance. There is no need to rehearse his qualities now, or to describe again the occasion.

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Nicholas Storey

May 8th, 2009 12:32pm Report this comment

Nice piece to start the day but I'm not convinced that Gray meant virtue as much as unreached potential for want of opportumity or even just circumstance.

William Laing, Sydney

May 11th, 2009 12:15pm Report this comment

Thank you, Mr Parris, that was beautiful. After reading, years ago, your very unfortunate comment about a "shame" evoked by the admittedly splendid Moscow Metro, I decided I would give Another Voice a rest for a good long time, perhaps forever. I am very glad I resumed. Thanks again for a beautiful column.

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